The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today:

The
more things change, the more they remain the same. We are beginning Cold War II (CWII)
with Russia, butting heads in several places in the world, none more important
this month than Ukraine. It brings to mind CW I. Here is a little history from
that time:

In 1952,
an American attaché in Moscow was fiddling with a shortwave radio when he heard the voice
of the American ambassador dictating letters in the Embassy, a few buildings
away. Although the Americans tore the walls out of the Ambassador’s office,
they weren’t able to find the listening device.

The broadcasts continued, so the Americans flew in two technical experts with special radio
finding equipment, who meticulously examined each object in the Ambassador’s
office. They finally tracked the signal to the wooden sculpture of the Great
Seal of the United States, hanging behind the Ambassador’s desk:

Henry Cabot Lodge showing bug at the UN
in 1960

The seal had been a
gift from the Soviet Boy Scouts. Cracking it open, they found a hollow cavity
and an unusual metal object, so mysterious in its design that it has come down
to us through history as “The Thing”:

It seemed too simple
to be a bug, but the little round can was a resonant cavity. The resonant cavity microphone was
patented by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in
1941. By pointing a
beam of radio waves at it at a particular frequency, it would sing back. The
metal antenna was just the right length to broadcast back one of the harmonics
of the signal.

The resonator was behind
the eagle’s beak. When someone in the room spoke, vibrations in the air would
shake the foil, slightly deforming the cavity, which in turn made the resonant
signal weaker or stronger. The Thing was a wireless, remotely powered
microphone. It had been hanging on the
ambassador’s wall for seven years.

The Thing has evolved
over time; today we call its descendent a RFID tag.
Our world is now full of these little pieces of metal and electronics that will
sing back to you if you shine the right radio wave on them.

But in 1952, this was
very cool stuff. American diplomats were up against technology from the future.
The person who designed the listening device was Lev Sergeyvich Termen.
Termen was born in Petersburg in 1896, to an aristocratic family. He was a
musical child and became an accomplished cellist, but his greatest love was
physics and engineering.

In 1917, Termen joined
the Bolshevik revolution, and was assigned to work at a new Soviet research
laboratory. His first job was to build a capacitative sensor to measure the
electrical properties of gases. It consisted of two metal plates; by
introducing a gas sample between the plates you could take a reading.

Instead of using a
regular dial for taking readings, Termen plugged in his headphones. The pitch
of the signal in the headphones corresponded to the value of the reading. Termen
noticed that when he moved his hands near the metal plates, it would affect the
pitch. He taught himself to play a few melodies, and his colleagues got
excited. “Termen is playing the voltmeter!” Termen soon had
constructed the world’s first electronic musical instrument.

His colleagues called
it the “Termenvox”, in his honor. Ninety-two
years ago this month, Termen was summoned to the Kremlin to
meet Lenin, who loved the device. That was the start of a journey that laid the foundations for
modern electronic music.

We, of course call
the device the Theremin, used in music
and movie soundtracks to produce sounds we associate with science fiction. In
popular music, it was used most notably on “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys.

Termen playing the Theremin, 1929

According to Albert
Glinsky’s book, Theremin:
Ether Music and Espionage, Stalin sent Termen to America, where he became
the toast of New York society, while passing information on US industrial
technology back to the Soviets. From Glinsky:

Termen met
and married a young black American ballet dancer, Lavinia Williams, in 1938. Yet,
later that year, he returned suddenly to the Soviet Union, leaving his wife
behind. Some suggest he’d been kidnapped by Soviet officials, but Glinsky says
a combination of debt and homesickness led Theremin to return voluntarily.

That sounds doubtful, since he returned to Stalin’s
purges.
He was arrested and accused of being a counter-revolutionary, and received an eight year sentence in 1939. Termen was exiled to a Siberian labor
camp and subsequently vanished into the top-secret Soviet intelligence machine.

World War
II saved Termen’s life. He was put to work in an institution only the Soviet
Union could have invented, a prison
filled with the greatest engineers and aerodynamicists in the country. After the war, he worked on various listening
devices. In addition to ‘The Thing’, he developed an even more innovative
system called Buran,
which listened to the vibrations in a window pane by reflecting a beam of light
off of it.

This is
still cutting-edge stuff today. Termen had built a laser microphone before
there were even lasers. It won him his freedom. People who met Termen after the
war remarked on the fact that he would barely move his lips while he talked, a
habit born of life under constant surveillance.

Termen
spent years trying to join the Communist party, but they kept making excuses to
turn him away. When he was 90 years old, he applied again, but they told him
that to join he had to take a five-year advanced course in Marxism-Leninism.

So he did
it. He went to night school and passed the course.

In 1991,
literally weeks before the fall of the Soviet Union, Termen got his party
badge. The 95-year-old Bolshevik was briefly the newest Communist in the
country. When people asked him: “Lev Sergeyevich, why on Earth would you join
the Communist Party now, when everyone else is leaving?”

He gave
the most badass answer imaginable: “I promised Lenin.”

Can you
imagine someone in today’s Russia saying: “I promised Putin”?